Anglophonia ()
Converging accommodation in the Black Country Dialect
Abstract
This article illustrates and analyses various forms of grammatical accommodation in a corpus of recorded informal conversations and interviews with 22 Black Country (BC) dialect speakers and 3 Standard English (SE) speakers. The Black Country is an area of central England to the west of Birmingham. The variety of English spoken here contains many non-standard grammatical features, especially in the realisation of auxiliaries and pronouns. The paper begins with an analysis of the deliberate converging accommodation techniques used by the SE speaking interviewer, in an attempt to reduce the effects of the observer’s paradox during some of the recordings. Analysis of the data shows that this accommodation towards BC dialect was partial and occasionally inauthentic, yet it did indeed play a significant role in producing natural, authentic speech samples. Trudgill (1992: 7) comments that accommodation normally takes place during face-to-face intervention. However, this corpus contains examples of much more complex types of accommodation in reported speech. The paper analyses an extract where person X reports to person Y a conversation X had with person Z, in which Z reports to X a discussion she had with person A. Accommodation towards and away from BC dialect forms serves to disambiguate the situations of utterance involved, as well as clarifying relationships between the speakers. Finally, an example of what initially appeared to be the much rarer phenomenon of diverging accommodation is studied: a BC dialect speaker uses a SE feature (the third person subject pronoun she) in a context where the BC dialect variant (her in subject function) would be expected. Upon closer analysis, however, a second, more satisfactory, explanation is posited: the choice of pronoun (her or she) depends primarily on the relationship the speaker has with the referent of the pronoun in question.
Keywords
